LUCKY CHARMS are waltzes, lullabies, and odes to my inner melodramatic tween. When I was in middle school, I played the piano for hours in the evenings with all the lights out. I would make up melodies so lush and romantic they’d make my tween self teary.
These melodies were the way I breathed. They got my many feelings out of my body, onto the piano, and into the air. LUCKY CHARMS was born the same way. Writing pieces like this is elemental for me. It’s the kind of music I wrote before I was aware I was writing music. It’s the sound of my inner world, and that’s my goal with every piece I write: to make mind and soul audible, visible, and playable.
The score designs were done in vivid, highly pigmented watercolor. On the page, graphite notes disappear and reappear through shifting shades of green, blue, purple, and red. By tilting the original artwork at different angles, those hidden notes shimmer silver in the light. The watercolor and shape designs took multiple iterations to get right. I’ve had fragments of some of these melodies in my muscle memory since I was seventeen. They finally have a home on these pages.
These pieces are steeped in and ooze romance and the wonderment that comes over us when we wander through fields of green searching for four-leaf clovers, when we chase the ends of rainbows hoping for a pot of gold, when we gaze at the moon knowing countless souls are doing the same, when we make wishes on shooting stars, and when we allow ourselves to fall in love with others and with life itself.—Thérèse-Marie Chaix
THERE’S AN ART FORM LOST TO TIME CALLED EYE MUSIC, OR AUGENMUSIK. IN THE EARLY RENAISSANCE, MUSIC COULD BE FOUND HAND-DRAWN ON ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS IN THE SHAPES OF CIRCLES AND HEARTS. ARTIST AND COMPOSER THÉRÈSE-MARIE CHAIX TAKES THIS ANCIENT ART FORM TO CONTEMPORARY WHIMSICAL EXTREMES CREATING SCORES IN THE form of a MUSICAL GAME OF CONNECT THE DOTS, RAINBOWS ON PUFFY CLOUDS, SATURN’S RINGS, AND NOODLES TANGLED AROUND GIANT VIOLET CHOPSTICKS. SHE METICULOUSLY HAND-DRAWS HER ORIGINAL COMPOSITIONS FOR SOLO PIANO WITH GRAPHITE, COLORED PENCIL, WATERCOLOR, AND PASTEL. HER PROCESS BEGINS WITH THE DESIGN OF THE ARTWORK FULLY FORMED EXCEPT FOR THE NOTES. THE LENGTHS AND SHAPES OF THE STAVES THEN DICTATE THE LENGTH AND SHAPE OF THE MUSIC. THIS VISUAL APPROACH TO MUSIC COMPOSITION IS INTEGRAL TO THERESE-MARIE’S CREATIVE PROCESS. EACH PIECE TAKES BETWEEN TWENTY AND TWO HUNDRED HOURS TO COMPLETE FROM THE CREATION OF THE HAND-DRAWN ART SCORE TO THE COMPOSITION OF THE MUSIC ITSELF. “IT’S puzzled ME FOREVER that CLASSICAL MUSIC IS DEFINED AS ‘SERIOUS MUSIC’ AND YET MUSIC IS SOMETHING WE PLAY. WITH MY WORK, I TAKE PLAY VERY SERIOUSLY.”
